Most dispiriting thing I read today

From an article on threats against Barack Obama and his request for secret service protection in the Sunday Times of London (“Security net for Democrat with rally appeal” by Sarah Baxter, May 6, 2007), in a section discussing the reaction of his wife:

"Michelle Obama comforts herself with the thought that no African-American is free from the threat of violence. ‘I don’t lose sleep over it because the realities are that, as a black man, Barack can get shot going to the gas station,’ she said.”

She *comforts* herself with that thought? How on earth did the reporter translate Michelle Obama’s almost satirically cynical comment on violence and racism in American life to the idea that she is vaguely soothed by the fear and anger that this racism interjects into the lives of those who are its targets? I searched the article for hints of irony, but I am sad to say I found none.

Enthusiasm du jour

I blame my new entrancement on British television’s strange and profound talent for producing fascinating property shows. I could spend hour upon hour gaping mindlessly at the mundane but intricate strivings of perfectly ordinary people after the house of their dreams. But now I have encountered the pinnacle of this genre, a series (called Grand Designs) so entrancing that I am already laying plans to watch new episodes online when I return to the “Homeland” next week and am deprived of my Channel Four property-show fix. Each week new owners, some rich but many not, embark on the lengthy and always financially ruinous pursuit of an innovative home they have built, designed or shaped themselves. This evening the episode featured a couple who were determined to practice self-sufficiency in a giant octagonal hobbit-house built virtually single-handedly by the carpenter husband and roofed largely by the very able wife. By the end of the episode, despite ample evidence of the extreme hardship of the house’s birth pains, I found myself fighting back wild cravings to build my own residence out of straw bales (The house material of the people! Cheap, durable, replenishable! Anyone can learn to do it!), acquire a dry compost toilet (Not stinky at all! The man on television said so!), and invest in wind turbines. I am, I sometimes think, somewhat too suggestible.

The Best Thing I Read Today

From a New Yorker article (“Our Town” by Jill Lepore, April 2, 2007) on the Jamestown colony and the questionable veracity of the legendary Captain John Smith (who wrote an impossibly boastful memoir called True Travels):

“Philip Barbour, a linguist and former intelligence officer, scoured archives across Eastern Europe, where he was able to corroborate an astonishing number of details in Smith’s True Travels. All manner of additional research – including a successful re-creation, by the Boy Scouts of Graz, Austria, of a mountaintop torch-message system that Smith had described but which had never before been tested – further supported the Captain’s credibility.”

My opinion of the Boy Scouts, which is still scarred by their homophobic policies, is buoyed by the idea that somewhere in the world, troops are wholeheartedly verifying 400-year-old memoirs.